In a homogenous environment, a SAN storage vendor may have tools to identify storage usage down to the application level, such as IBM SAN Volume Controller for IBM SAN equipment (IBM, IBM SAN, and related terms are trademarks of IBM Corp. in the United States and/or other countries). As all allocation is known, forecasting can be performed following standard capacity management techniques. However, in a heterogeneous environment with multiple SAN vendors, as is seen in most outsourcing contracts, each storage vendor's tools do not inter-operate with other vendor's SAN, as their tool is seen as a competitive advantage.
Therefore, SAN environments are managed in a manual fashion and data collection for what is installed and allocated are difficult to collect. Given the lack of tool support, or the desire of an outsourced customer to reduced billed SAN usage, a discrepancy exists between the amount of storage allocated and the amount of storage actually installed. However, this utilized, but unallocated storage must still be included for accurate forecasts. In order to realize total cost of ownership, realized cost savings in newer technology an optimized plan for forecasting growth is critical in keeping cost down and avoiding. Unfortunately, no existing tool exists for providing such forecasting. In view of the foregoing there exists a need to a tool that solves at least one of the deficiencies in the related art.